Thermal, or infrared (IR), images of scenes are often useful for monitoring, inspection and/or maintenance purposes.
Typically, a thermal imaging device, e.g. in the form of a thermography arrangement or an infrared IR camera, is provided to capture infrared (IR) images as IR image data values, representing infrared radiation emitted from an observed real world scene. The captured IR image can after capturing be displayed or visualized and analyzed on a display in a computer system such as a thermography arrangement, infrared IR camera, smartphone, tablet computer, laptop computer, desktop computer or a wrist-worn computer configured with a touch screen with a touch based user input functionality.
As infrared radiation is not visible to the human eye there are no natural relation between the captured infrared (IR) image's data values of each pixel in an IR image and greyscale or colors displayed on a display. Therefore an information visualization image processing referred to as false color or pseudo color is used to map captured infrared (IR) image data values of each pixel in an IR image to a palette used to present the corresponding pixel displayed on a display, e.g. using grey-scale or colors.
Further, as IR images by nature are generally low contrast and noisy, the captured IR image may be subjected to further imaging processing in to improve the interpretability of the image before displaying it to a user, such as filtering or combination/fusion with visual light images captured of the same observed real world scene.
Applying an appropriate imaging processing to an IR image for display to a user is a cumbersome process as the requirements may vary significantly with the observed real world scene, objects of interest in the observed real world scene, the type of application or use case and user preference.
There is therefore a need to reduce complexity and time for a user to find an appropriate imaging processing to apply to an IR image for display to a user, in particular in a computer system configured with a touch screen with a touch based user input functionality. Thereby the interpretability of an IR image is improved and particular aspects or details of the image may be analyzed.